Henry steele commager biography of michael jackson

One favorite cause was his campaign to challenge the constitutionality of the Central Intelligence Agency, the budget of which, being classified, violates the requirement of Article I of the U. Constitution that no moneys can be spent by the federal government except those specifically appropriated by Congress. He continued his critique on constitutional and moral grounds of American defense and foreign policies during the administrations of Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.

Bush T hough Commager often characterized himself as a Jeffersonian, we must understand his use of the term. Commager's Jefferson was an enlightened and far-seeing philosophical statesman, a tolerant man with a sweeping commitment to human freedom and a confident, philosophically-rooted pragmatism about politics and governance. His version of Jefferson, and thus his enlisting under Jefferson's banner, is best understood as a reflection of his formative period's version of Jefferson, strongly flavored as it was by Jefferson's leading advocate at that time, President Franklin D.

Commager's Jeffersonianism was refracted through his admiration for Roosevelt and the New Deal -- just as his friend and counterpart Arthur M. Commager was representative of his time in following Roosevelt's oft-quoted prescription of applying Hamiltonian means to Jeffersonian ends, and in regarding Jefferson and many of the other great figures of the Revolutionary generation almost as contemporaries and intellectual compatriots.

He often was interviewed on television news programs and public-affairs documentaries to provide historical perspective on such diverse events as the Apollo XI moon landing and the Watergate crisis. C ommager's status as a professional historian anchored his credibility as a participant in the public controversies into which he threw himself.

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Indeed, Commager would have insisted both that his work as a historian informed his engagement with contemporary political affairs, and that his engagement with the politics of his day inspired his most creative and effective explorations and interpretations of the American past. Commager saw these two roles not as divided realms but as points on a spectrum of activity.

It is thus not surprising that Commager was most often drawn to two earlier generations of engaged intellectuals who also worked closely with history - the Progressives of the early twentieth century and the Revolutionary generation of Americans of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries - nor that he also devoted careful and respectful study to two other nineteenth-century figures who were both scholars and engaged intellectuals, Justice Joseph Story and Alexis de Tocqueville.

Commager originally studied Danish historyand wrote his PhD dissertation on the Danish philosopher Johann Friedrich Struenseea major reformer during the Enlightenment. Under the influence of his mentor at Chicago, the constitutional historian Andrew C. McLaughlinCommager shifted his research and teaching interests to American history.

Another of his mentors was the colonial American historian Marcus W. Jerneganfor whom he later co-edited a festschrift with William T. HutchisonThe Marcus W. Commager taught at New York University from toat Columbia University from toand at Amherst College in Massachusetts from to Commager emphasized to his generations of students that historians must write not only for one another but for a wider audience.

Commager's first solo book was his biography Theodore Parker: Yankee Crusadera life of the Unitarian minister, transcendentalistreformer, and abolitionist Theodore Parker ; it was reissued inalong with a volume edited by Commager collecting the best known of Parker's many writings. Commager was principally an intellectual and cultural historian ; he was influenced by the literary historian Vernon L.

Parringtonbut also worked in the fields of constitutional and political history. His work on this subject includes his series of controversial lectures, Majority Rule and Minority Rightswhich argued for a curtailed scope for judicial reviewpointing out on the history of the US Supreme Court 's uses of judicial review to strike down economic regulatory legislation in the first decades of the twentieth century.

Later, Commager espoused the use of judicial review by the Supreme Court under the leadership of Chief Justice Earl Warren to protect racial and religious minorities from discrimination and to safeguard individual liberties as protected by the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment. Commager was coauthor, with Samuel Eliot Morisonof the widely used history text The Growth of the American Republic ; ; ;; ; 7th ed.

Henry steele commager biography of michael jackson: Henry Steele Commager, one of the

Leuchtenburg; abridged editions in and under the title Concise History of the American Republic. Morrisare comprehensive collections of primary sources on the Civil War and the American Revolution as seen by participants. With Richard B. Morris, he also co-edited the highly influential New American Nation Series, a multi-volume collaborative history of the United States under whose aegis appeared many significant and prize-winning works of historical scholarship.

This series was a successor to the American Nation series planned and edited at the beginning of the twentieth century by the Harvard historian Albert Bushnell Hart. At Columbia, Commager mentored a series of distinguished historians who earned their PhD degrees under his tutelage, including Harold HymanLeonard W. Levyand William E. When he moved to Amherst, an elite undergraduate college, he no longer mentored PhD candidates, but he mentored undergraduates, including R.

Bernsteinwho later became a historian of the U. Constitution and a specialist in the era of the American Revolution. Commager felt a duty as a professional historian to reach out to his fellow citizens. He believed that an educated public that understands American history would support liberal programs, especially internationalism and the New Deal of Franklin D.

Although he was skilled at scholarly research and analysis, he preferred to devise and expound sweeping interpretations of historical events and processes, while also making available primary sources so that people could study history for themselves. Commager was representative of a generation of like-minded historians widely read by the general public, including Samuel Eliot MorisonAllan NevinsRichard HofstadterArthur Schlesinger Jr.

Vann Woodward. Jumonville says history now features abstruse deconstruction by experts, with statistics instead of stories, and is comprehensible now only to the initiated, with ethnocentrism ruling in place of common identity. Commager was a liberal interpreter of the Constitution and Bill of Rightswhich he understood as creating a powerful general government that at the same time recognized a wide spectrum of individual rights and liberties.

Commager opposed McCarthyism in the s and s, the war in Vietnam on constitutional groundsand what he saw as the rampant illegalities and unconstitutionalities perpetrated by the administrations of Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. One favorite cause was his campaign to point out that, because the budget of the Central Intelligence Agency is classified, it violates the requirement of Article One of the Constitution that no moneys can be spent by the federal government except those specifically appropriated by Congress.

Commager wrote hundreds of essays and opinion pieces on history or presenting a historical perspective on current issues for popular magazines and newspapers.

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He often was interviewed on television news programs and public-affairs documentaries to provide historical perspective on such events as the Apollo 11 Moon landing and the Watergate crisis. Benjamin W. Cramer states:. Commager's lifelong advocacy of intellectual freedom, popular knowledge, and the historical interpretation of contemporary issues has had long-lasting influence on scholars and public advocates, though over the years his politics has been seen as either too liberal or too conservative by various detractors.

He is ranked among such other great historians of his time as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. Although at first Commager was not deeply concerned with race, he became an advocate for civil rights for African Americans, as he was for other groups. In he fought to allow the African-American historian John Hope Franklin to present a paper at the Southern Historical Association and agreed to introduce him to the group.

Board of Educationbut at the time he was not persuaded that this litigation would succeed on historical grounds, and so advised the lawyers. The document stressed the importance of international lawconservation of natural resources, disarmament, the world's oceans, and the peaceful exploration of outer space, among other things. Commager and his co-author Samuel Eliot Morison received vigorous criticism from African-American intellectuals and other scholars for their popular textbook The Growth of the American Republicfirst published in Comitona fl.

Comitoli, Paolo. Comissiona, Sergiu. Comiskey, Charles Albert. Command Security Corporation. Commander in Chief of British Forces. Commander in Chief's Guard. Commander in Chief, President as. Commander of the Faithful. Updated Aug 24 About encyclopedia. Related Topics Henry Steel Olcott. Samuel Eliot Morison. Henry of Zwiefalten, Bl.

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